Salammbô

"Salammbo walked to the edge of the terrace; her eyes swept the horizon for an instant, and then were lowered upon the sleeping town, while the sigh that she heaved swelled her bosom, and gave an undulating movement to the whole length of the long white simar which hung without clasp or girdle about her. Her curved and painted sandals were hidden beneath a heap of emeralds, and a net of purple thread was filled with her disordered hair."

simar

\Si*mar"\, n. [F. simarre. See Chimere.] A woman's long dress or robe; also light covering; a scarf.


Salammbo sounds like a deliciously sensuous woman, if too taken with religion. But religion is often substituted for sexual gratification when frustration becomes otherwise intolerable.

Lola, you got the spirit of Salammbô quite quickly...

Unless you have the hots for one within their horde. In that case, fall on your knees and swoon while you formulate your plan to find your way to the barbarian's tent.

sex and aggression......they are the motivators......all else is elaboration. It's a good book, I will agree. Women were reduced to conniving in those days. Hysteria almost always paid.

Lola:-

There are other women in the book.They don't feature much but it is strong.It might depend on which edition you have though.

A GOOD book?????!!!!!!!!

23.45 hrs GMT is my approximate time of return.

EM might be up and about by then.

I'll drink to ya.

Translation A.J. Krailsheimer, 1977. Reprinted 1979,1981,1983,1985, 1987 Printed and bound in Great Britan

There you have it.......mr. speindi

Lola:-

I wonder how many reprints there might have been and you got to close enough to nearly miss it.

I'm sorry I'm late back.Vic got staring at a lady's foot.I tried explaining how dangerous they can be but he wouldn't listen.I had to drag him out.He was on about the filigrees of blue veins and the way she was wriggling the heel as she pretended to be interested in what the bloke she was with was explaining.

At one point there were three ladies stood at the bar trying to order drinks and the three blokes they were with were sat on their big fat stupid arses looking like spare parts on a lunar mission.
Am I missing something with this feminism business.

No ehBeth.

I am bottom centre and that's Lola on the chair.

Lola,

If you love and miss your home so much, why go to the coast in the first place?

I enjoy travel, I also have strong ties, emotional ties especially to my home and homeland. However, when I am preparing for a trip, and most trips I take are usually long trips, I do not miss home. I accept it's beauty when I return. I rekindle my love affair with my home, land and gardens. It is nice to see loved one's, friends and relations. Absence indeed does make the heart grow fonder, whilst away however, the thoughts never enter my head. I am enjoying what I am doing and being there.

Oh and by the way, I thought conniving was an inherent trait of all women?

From experience, some have not that trait...

Bottom center..........chair? Did I miss a thing or two?

Modern women need not connive. All we have to do these days is go get what we want. Fainting and conniving is retro. And as Francis said, some women are not.

Lola:-

It was a pic ehBeth put up and then took off.

Come, come Lola,

You all connive, It's part of your evolutionary pattern, Delilah being one good example without giving it too much thought. Francis is merely referring to those spinsters who reside in the Falklands, Orkney's, Ozark's, Iceland and such places . They, the innocent pet's have to get down to 'graft.'

It depends on your definition of connive.

con·nive ( P ) Pronunciation Key (k-nv)
intr.v. con·nived, con·niv·ing, con·nives
1. To cooperate secretly in an illegal or wrongful action; collude: The dealers connived with customs officials to bring in narcotics.
2. To scheme; plot.
3. To feign ignorance of or fail to take measures against a wrong, thus implying tacit encouragement or consent: The guards were suspected of conniving at the prisoner's escape.

We are all trying to influence, but women are no more likely to be doing this than men. Some women connive, but none of us has to based on our position of power. We can do as we please these days. If I connive it is in response to another who I sense to be conniving him/herself.

Pure sexism

"The business of the artist,Flaubert held,is not to dramatize,to simplify life,but to interpret it.The artist is not a moralist:he is not required to conclude but only to express as perfectly as he can the inexplicable complexity of that experience we call living.The facts of life are neither good nor bad,beautiful or ugly:they simply exist.What makes them beautiful or ugly is their expression,the form given to them by the artist;for all great art is beauty."

Flaubert thought...."that any human experience,if it is to be of value to the artist,must be sublimated and ruthlessly stripped of its subjective element."

He abhorred women who.."kiss sacred relics,weep at the moon,get deliirious with tenderness when they see children,swoon at the theatre,and look pensive before the ocean."

He gave up on women when he eventually realised that their inability to rid themselves of the subjective prevented them expressing their beauty.
Not their fashionable beauty I should add which is hardly skin deep.

He shovelled Romanticism over a cliff and that takes a bit of doing.Subjectivism,oh so tempting,the need to judge and simplify,was placed out of sight and out of mind and the Westen world took a decisive step.It matters not a jot if 95% didn't buy it.The 5% who did,if that,are the ones who matter.

"Yes" ,he said,"the stupidity consists in desiring to conclude.We are but threads and want to know the pattern."He beat that out of his system in order to adopt an attitude of "tranquil indifference and serene contempt."

Hence Madame Bovary.Charged,tried and acquitted.When the piss-ups died down his old urge to express the "apocalyptic,coloured visions of exotic beauty" returned.

But the task was one Hercules himself might have passed by."Benedictine perseverence" was the order of the day.100 volumes on Catharge,"eighteen tons of Cahen's Bible",the classics for military lore,forgotten screeds,treatises on the cypress,on cookery,old armour,Arabian materia medica,costumes,cults,customs,architecture and the perfumes of the Ancients.Months on the site of Catharge.After that he threw everything away and started again."I am demolishing everything.It was absurd!impossible! false!.....Reality is an almost impossible thing in such a subject.There remains the resource of doing it poetically,but then one slips back into a quantity of old twaddle.....I am not mentioning the archaeological work which must not make itself felt,or the style,which is almost impossibe.To be true one would have to be obscure,to speak gibberish,and to stuff the book with notes." At any cost,however,the novel must avoid being subjective in the Romantic sense:it will be neither "historical,satirical,nor humourous''.IT WILL PROVE NOTHING..On the other hand neither must it be a scietific treatise but a work of art:and the secret of all masterpieces for Flaubert is "the concordance of the subject with the author's temperment." (Thus it is perilous to criticise works of art,One is simply saying something about one's own temperment.)

Flaubert was forced to point out to his critics that "for the pagan,love was precisely a kind of madness,a terrible affliction of divine origin." (Now you know how to spot phoney pagans.) We must not make the error of regarding Salammbo through modern eyes;we must not hope to find in the souls of its characters the climates which surround our own.

Spendius is "the fertile source of all its action."His intelligence is "unclouded by passion".All his actions are "marked by a malicious and devilish humour" caused by the "discrepancy between the baseness of his social condition and the superiority of his intellectual gifts." He is a coward but he dies on the cross with a joke.

I have quoted from Professor Green's 1931 introduction to this literary masterpiece with bits from the writer himself interlarded and I will leave off with his climax-

""He has the secret,known only to the great poet,of condensing in a word or in a phrase an infinity of perspectives,so that,whilst to read Salammbo is a rare pleasure,to reflect upon it is a perennial source of delight."

And we could all do with some of that which sadly our teachers could not provide except for a few rare and much loved exceptions.

And so to the work

THE FEAST

It was at Megara,a suburb of Carthage,in the gardens of Hamilcar.The soldiers whom he had commanded in Sicily were having a great feast to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Eryx,and,as the master was away,and they were numerous,they ate and drank with perfect freedom."

Like we do with God away.

Lola,
You are a typical woman, regardless of your attempts to make out you have an upper edge on most. It is extremely annoying, if not considered downright rude and inconsiderate of you, to be in conversation with another, take a few days off, wasting energy and polluting the atmosphere on a regular basis. Then to commence moaning and groaning like the wicked witch about how much you have missed home and your fabulous apartment. AND THEN to return and simply jump back onto the thread with your thoughts, nothing else matters! Please take the time to read back to where it was you left off, prior to coming on board with the price of Wisconsin Apples.

Mathos:-

The price of Wisconsin apples might be important.Perhaps you don't know Milo Minderbinder.(Google google).

Mathos, you are a very silly man. If you're a character invented by another participant, then you represent a very good example of an eebee. And an opinionated and foolish one at that. If you are a real person.......oy! In any case, I don't address you much because you're too ill tempered and argumentative about silly things to attract my attention. Either say something worth responding to, or be quiet. We don't have time for insipid observations.